John Hagel on The Social Web

I am releasing my conversation with John Hagel in three segments. In the first segment we discussed the real-time web. Here we discuss the move from the information web to the Social Web.

John makes the point that the rise of the Social Web feels “a bit like Back to the Future” for people who have a long history with the Internet. In the early days the Internet functioned to link people – scientists, researchers etc. The advent of the World Wide Web saw the Internet functioning more as a publishing platform. Now, with the Social Web, we are back full circle to a network that connects people together. When you connect people to people (as opposed to just brokering information) you are able to surface valuable tacit knowledge that is difficult to express in documents.

Really interesting your conversation I hope to see the other 2 parts soon because I can imagin than you have a lot of more information for us !

Ted

Part of the conversation reaffirms that information has to be formalized (e.g., entered as tagged text or made infer-able, or sensed via pervasive/ubiquitous means) before it is susceptible to algorithms and networking (in the computing sense), so that we may realize the automated vision of social software. Of course this has been known for millenia (in Internet years)–think of the early CSCW and Workflow research, resting upon similar hypotheses. In some sense, the spirit of this was at the dawn of computing, back in the first mechanized census tabulations, no? Back then, we did not have higher-order analysis with quick feedback into the social structures, and I suppose that part is novel.

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